The first 3 titles in The New Brunswick Chapbook Series are being offered at a discounted price.
Due to increased postage for US and other International locations, it is being offered to Canadians only. For non-Canadian locations, please e-mail us for the correct price.
The New Brunswick Chapbook Series consists of 3 titles:

An Equally Uncharitable Wonderland

Poetry by Shane Neilson

Inspired by:
Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
Tom Waits' album Alice
George A. Walker's Alice wood engravings
Illustrated with wood engravings by George A. Walker as well as some adaptations of the original Tenniel images.

Distributaries

Poetry chapbook by Laura McRae

Laura McCrae's debut chapbook is an ambitious long poem that distributes a wide range of film, visual art, and literary references across a personal and public narrative that relies upon water for order, just as humans history has done. Obviously impressive at the level of structure and endurance, the key recommendation we make about this text is its scoured, careful language: McCrae's precision, brevity, and magpie eye make this a quite unusual debut, one that makes each word earn its keep.

Nobody's Empire

Poetry chapbook by Nathaniel G. Moore

Nathaniel Moore offers readers his trademark poignant nostalgia: love as an adolescent, undercut by goofball and tragic humour. Frog Hollow Press is proud to present this veteran poet in a disciplined way, with Moore's beautiful excess of antique pop imagery and jokes steadily doing the work of poetry.

The Noise of the Weeping of the People

New Brunswick Chapbook Series: volume one
Short Fiction by Nancy Bauer

Nancy Bauer was born in Massachusetts and moved to NB in 1965. She has received awards like the CBC Literary Award for the short story in 1982 and the Alden Nowlan Award for Literary Excellence in 1999. She co-founded the Maritime Writers' Workshop, served as a member of the organizing committee of the Writers' Federation of NB, and held the writer-in-residence position at UNB. This is her first bound publication in over twenty years.

New Brunswick Chapbook Series:

Nancy Bauer released 25 chapbooks as publisher of the New Brunswick Chapbook series. Authors in the series included some names that form the firmament of Canadian Literature, including a chapbook of poetry by David Adams Richards.
The cover of The Noise of the Weeping of the People is inspired by the original design used on those same chapbooks, originally commissioned from Fredericton-located (but nationally renowned) artists Bruno Bobak and Marjory Donaldson. Our Volume One (2016) features an architectural drawing of the Arts ad Library Groups at the University of New Brunswick — the University has graciously granted us permission to use this image.
Nancy Bauer's chapbook will be the first entry in a revisioned New Brunswick Chapbook series published by Frog Hollow Press.

SCROLLS

Natalie Helberg, dearest Naoko, who said horseshit is astronomical
SCROLL SERIES: NUMBER THREE

These long poem Scrolls are printed with pigment inks on archival
and acid-free Zerkall Ingres paper and measure approximately
16.5 x 23.4 inches each.
Each is printed in a numbered, limited edition of 10 copies. CA$50.00

The Scrolls can be purchased by sending an email to:
NEILSS@MCMASTER.CA with 'Scroll Series' in the subject line

2015 Titles

Brotherly Love: poems of Sappho and Charaxos

Poetry chapbook by Annick MacAskill

Taking off from recent discoveries, Annick MacAskill creates an alternate, imaginative history-in-poetry involving Sappho and her lesser-known sibling, Charaxos, creating a poetic epistolary conversation that is sharp in image and steeped in wry tenderness. MacAskill is a new voice that animates an ache across the centuries.

The Kid Series evolves, in this instance with Brian Bartlett selecting poems that involve the theme and subject of childhood, and with the requisite series twist: these poems feature a child-consciousness without the overwhelming presence of a parent speaker. To introduce the volume, Brian has written a superb essay that contextualizes the "kid poem" in Canada and also establishes his own personal vision of the form.

Rebecca Salazar, Guest Editor

Rebecca Salazar, a poet gaining prominence in Canada, collects together 10 poets from Fredericton who have yet to publish in chapbook or book form. Her selection provides a snapshot of poetry as it is being written, providing attention to poets who will, like Rebecca, be known based on the quality of the work they've written and work they will write.

Printed on 70 lb. paper and Saddle Stitched (stapled) into a full colour cover. B&W illustrations.

Crito di Volta (I-IV, VII and XIII)

Poetry by Marc di Saverio
Illustrations by Marc di Saverio

Marc Di Saverio has applied his preternatural poetic abilities to the epic form. Frog Hollow Press is proud to present completed poem-fragments from the beginning of Crito Di Volta, Marc's epic, a blistering work meant to change the way mental illness is perceived in Canada. Marc's own art illustrates the poems.

How Thought Feels: the poetry of M.Travis Lane

Travis Lane is a sorely neglected poet from New Brunswick. With over fifteen books of poetry published, her poetry has sung largely out of earshot of the Canadian poetry establishment. She is also a humble woman and did not grab the megaphone to force people to listen. In How Thought Feels, Frog Hollow Press grabs the megaphone. Celebrated poet, philosopher, and essayist Jan Zwicky considers Lane's poetics; Jeanette Lynes situates Lane in the ecopoetics tradition; and Shane Neilson considers demographic and thematic factors (especially Lane's superlative moral-ethical-spiritual work) which reinforce Lane's ongoing neglect. Because Lane has served as a poetry reviewer for over fifty years, and because her prose is the spiritual antecedent to the critical prose in this volume, How Thought Feels provides a complete prose bibliography on Lane as well as two unique compiled long poems that scavenge elements from Travis' poetry to make for a coherent statement upon Lane's central concerns as poet.

Loid

Poetry chapbook by Danny Jacobs
Artwork by Jesse Jacobs

Danny Jacobs already has a reputation as a poet with an impeccable sonic sense. In Loid, Jacobs builds upon his skill with sound and writes poems with heart, formal elegance, and structure. This chapbook suggests his next full-length collection will be unstoppable. Frog Hollow watches this New Brunswicker with real pride!

Michael Prior, Guest Editor
Cover photograph by Amanda Siebert

Wunderkind Michael Prior assembles together ten Vancouver poets who are all unpublished in book or chapbook form. He has sought out talented people whose verse somehow represents his city's poetic and introduced that poetic in personal prose. The poets in The City Series: Vancouver constitute a cross-section of poetry that is diverse, brainy, and emotional, upending stereotypes about Vancouver as a poetry-town.

Factory

Poems by Robert Colman

Rob Colman embraces the theme of factory work and industrial decline to create a poetics of parts. These parts work together to create a kind of found, cut life that mocks white collar hypocrisy as much as it satirizes the empty pleasures of sex. In the end, this impressive collection seems to say, there is only verisimilitude and the real pleasure of form.

Sing to Me in the Cut: Ekphrasis on George Walker by Canadian Poets

Shane Neilson, editor
Wood engravings by George A. Walker

George Walker is one of the transcendent artists of our time. That he largely works in wood engravings has limited his popular appeal but recent efforts (like Walker's The Life and Times of Conrad Black, a biography of Conrad Black published by the Porcupine's Quill & The Wordless Leonard Cohen Songbook, also from the Porcupine's Quill, also a biographical mosaic of its famous subject) will change that.
Early accomplishments will cement his legacy too: Walker was the first Canadian to illustrate Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass. Walker's track record transforming other cultural materials into art has now been paid back in a very preliminary sense: Frog Hollow Press' Sing to me in the cut is a book of ekphrasis by Canadian poets who have responded to images in either of Walker's The Inverted Line (PQL 2000) or Images from the Neocerebellum (PQL 2007). Poem and wood engravings are paired in the book, demonstrating that Walker has inspired several generations of Canadian poets. The poets range from mature, generation-leading talents like Al Moritz to up-and-comers like Blair Trewartha. Each poet answers George's incredible work, agreeing that, yes, the roads are their veins; the moon matters; portraits are always of pain; that there's something not right with the picture.

CATALOGUE: 2014 Titles

Living in the Orchard: the Poetry of Peter Sanger

Literary Criticism Monograph: number four
by Amanda Jernigan
Artwork by John Haney

It gives Frog Hollow pleasure to bring together a young, talented
Canadian poetry critic with Peter Sanger, dean of Canadian
poetry criticism, and an unfairly neglected poet in his own right.
Living in the Orchard is Amanda Jernigan's intimate look at
Sanger's work and example. Suspicious of biography, Sanger is
nonetheless intensely interested in the relationship between art
and life: Jernigan considers the intersections between life and
letters that his work enacts. Including a comprehensive
bibliography of Sanger's prose-works, this monograph is both
a major contribution to and a starting point for future Sanger
scholarship. It includes new artwork by Jernigan's husband,
the visual artist John Haney, making for a tribute to Sanger's
own history of word-and-image collaborations. You will feel
personally involved in this essay: a story of metamorphosis,
it is a metamorphosis in itself.

Play: Poems About Childhood

Shane Neilson has collected together poems about childhood and parenthood by over 25 Canadian poets. The list of assembled poets is a holistic who's who of Canadian poetry: Christian Bok, George Elliott Clarke, Alden Nowlan, Steven Heighton, Ken Babstock, Milton Acorn, Susan Holbrook, Travis Lane, Wayne Clifford, and more. These poems served Shane during the year his son and daughter were ill. An introductory essay provides a cognitive mapping of the provenance of the anthology, situating the poems that come afterward. Part scholarly, part impression, and all record of a difficult time, this is an unusual, idiosyncratic anthology that follows an emotional logic. The poems build a narrative of beauty, destruction, defiance, and life.

Play: Poems About Childhood is the first in a planned series of such "rotating personal canon" anthologies, and future anthologists in the series will put their stamp on the same topic by including poems that they apply to their own lives.

"The origin of poetry is presumed to be song; but what is the origin of the poem? This anthology attempts to explain the origins of original poems by asking 27 poets to create a dialogue with a favourite poem (their own) in the form of an essay.
The poets were given free reign in answering; some were short and sharp, others ranged further, thinking of the essay as an opportunity to discover the means of poetry, how biography and image and the right words render themselves unto a poem.
The results are sometimes essayistic and sometimes indivisible from their poetic origins. Poets can be as various as reaching back to Robert Browning, sideways to a heteronym, or forward to the process of revision. Each of the poets surprised themselves as they trawled their consciousness, discovering not just the elements of their poems, but their process."
- Shane Neilson

REVIEWS

Reviewed by Jason Guriel, "The Murk of Poem-Stuff," in CNQ number 81, Winter/Spring 2011, pp. 83-86.

Offered in two bindings, both printed on acid-free, archival 80 lb. Mohawk Eggshell paper. Covers are printed on Japanese silk bookcloth and on custom-made St-Armand papers using an Epson printer with K3 pigment inks.
208 pp.

Alden Nowlan & Illness

Canadian Masters Series: Volume One.
Poems selected and essay by Shane Neilson with fore- and after-words by Gregory Cook and Robert Gibbs.
Original wood engraving by Wesley Bates.

Letterpressed book.

This deluxe volume was originally offered in an edition of 150 hand-sewn Coptic-bound books for $125. In 2008, the remaining 35 copies were commercially bound in a traditional cloth-over-boards format and offered at $90.
Hand-printed on Magnani Book Biblos, a mould-made paper from Italy; endpapers are cotton paper.

The Book of Widows

Contemporary Canadian Poets: Volume 6.
New poems by M.Travis Lane
Wood engravings by George A.Walker

Notes from the Editor: "Travis Lane has crafted a book comprised of grief: the first half is devoted to grieving myths, taking famous widows and their kicking sorrows; the second half is visceral grief, the poet's own, focusing on the death of her husband and its aftermath.
This is a morbid collection in the best sense: funereal and felt, a resigned protest against what can't be fought, the inevitability of all things returning to poetry." - Shane Neilson

REVIEWS

The Book of Widows was reviewed by Patricia Young in The Fiddlehead, #244 Summer 2010 Poetry Issue, pp. 206-208.

Offered in two bindings, both of which are printed on acid-free, archival 80 lb. Mohawk Eggshell paper. Covers are printed on bookcloth and mould-made papers using an Epson printer with K3 pigment inks. 64 pp

Dr. Acorn or: how I joined the Canadian Liberation Movement and learned to love the
stern nurse fusion-bomb

Literary Criticism Monograph: number three
by Shane Neilson

Shane Neilson has written an "adventures in creative non-fiction criticism" monograph about Milton Acorn. Shane writes about Acorn's life and work as the example it should be for Canadian poets. Acorn's successes and failures are considered, using the recently released In a Springtime Instant, a collected poems of Acorn released by Mosaic Press, as a foil. The exuberance of Shane's prose attempts to match Acorn's restless energy.

Offered as a Sewn soft-covered limited edition book of 52 pp.
Printed on 57 lb. 100% PCW paper with a full colour cover
and multiple greyscale endpapers. Full colour cover.
Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro.

Edition of 150 numbered copies of which approx. 100 are for sale.
ISBN 978-1-926948-12-6 Price $17.50

John Glassco and the Other Montreal

Canadian Masters Series: volume two
Selections and essay by Carmine Starnino
Original portrait by Wesley Bates

"Unsmiling and seigneurial, John Glassco stares out from the back of his 1971 Selected Poems. He is sixty-two. His mustache is trimmed, his ascot crisp; a pampered air attends his expression…

Glassco — Buffy, to friends — was at the height of his prestige not only as a poet (Selected Poems would go on to win the Governor-General's Award for Poetry) but as a diversely gifted man of letters. Memoirs of Montparnasse, a sparkling evocation of Paris during the 1920s, had been published to wide acclaim the previous year. It was joined by The Poetry of French Canada in Translation, a landmark anthology where nearly half the contributions were done by his own hand. Adding to these achievements were critical essays, book reviews, short stories, even pornographic novels…
A first-rate stylist, Glassco regarded writing as a challenge best overcome by panache. No matter the genre, he always showed the world a well-cut form. He ran with a pack of Montreal poets, among them F.R. Scott and Ralph Gustafson, who brought something courtly and sophisticated to Canadian Literature…"

And so begins Carmine Starnino's introduction to the book.

REVIEWED BY:

George Fetherling, "Remembering Glassco" in CNQ, Canadian Notes and Queries, Number 83, Summer/Fall 2011, pp. 82-84.

Andrew Lesk, "Two Books on John Glassco" in The Malahat Review, Number 176, Fall 2011.

Reviews of Brian Busby's A Gentleman of Pleasure (Montreal, McGill-Queen's, 2011) and our John Glassco and the Other Montreal, essay and selections by Carmine Starnino.

Offered in two limited edition bindings and printed on archival and acid-free 80 lb. Mohawk Eggshell Text. Typeset in 'Filosofia' designed by Zuzana Licko of Émigré Fonts with titling in 'Tisa' designed by Mitja Miklavcic. 88 pp.

Seawrack

Contemporary Canadian Poets, volume 7
Poetry by David Helwig
Cover art by George Loewen

David Helwig has written two-handed poetry: a lyrical seasonal record appears in series with a strange, discomfiting, valedictory narrative. The seasonal record is short and tight, the odd narrative explosive in subject and in emotion. Helwig has already found acclaim as a poet but this book will surprise his devoted readers and should attract new ones.

Offered in two bindings, both of which have been printed on acid-free, archival 80 lb. Mohawk Superfine Text. Covers have been printed using an Epson printer with K3 pigment inks. Typeface: Sabon, designed by Jan Tschichold. 108 pp.

Small Data

by Steve Noyes

Featuring short, tight lyrics of lexical exuberance, Small Data showcases the best work of Steve Noyes' career to date. This small collection builds on Noyes' familiar humour and emotion, adding to the data already compiled about Noyes: a deft showman.

Printed on 80 lb. archival and acid-free Mohawk Via 'vellum', this book has been released as a numbered limited edition, Smyth-sewn chapbook. Covers and endpapers are also of Mohawk Via. Typeset in 'Bembo Book', designed by Robin Nicholas and based on Stanley Morison's 1929 version of the original 15th century cuts.

Sotto Voce

Sotto Voce starts off a big bang, the long poem "Paradoxes of Motion", and continues with formally varied poems (prose poems, anaphoric poems, a character study, an assemblage of meaningful objects, and others) that display a range of technique and a knack for creating different tones and moods, partly through the offsetting of words of small difference so as to tease out poetry from the differences in meaning.

Printed on archival Mohawk Via Vellum, this book has been released as a limited edition, Smyth-sewn chapbook. Covers were printed on archival and acid-free St-Armand`s 'white cotton' using an Epson 3800 with K3 pigment inks. Cover and title page photographs are by Patricia Robinson. Flyleafs are of Nepalese Lokta. The typeface, 'Mrs. Eaves', was designed by Zsusana Licko of Émigré Fonts.

Limited edition of 100 numbered copies of which #16-100 are for sale. 40 pages.
ISBN 978-1-926948-07-2 Original price $22

The whole and broken yellows: Van Gogh poems
and others

Poetry by Jennifer Zilm
Shortlisted for the 2014 Robert Kroetsch Award

Jennifer Zilm's intertextual inhabitation of Vincent Van Gogh's life makes for a poetry that expands upon the body of work that has sprung from the artist's published letters. As precise as the painter's palette, she creates poems as complex in aggregate as Van Gogh's imagination, and as brightly sad.

Offered as a limited edition sewn chapbook of 125 numbered copies. Printed on 50 lb. Glatfelter Extra Bulk with a full-colour cover. Typeset in Dolly and Dolly Small Caps.

The Critique of Pure Reason

Offered as a limited edition sewn chapbook of 45 pp.
Printed on 57 lb. 100% PCW paper with a full-colour cover
featuring an etching and aquatint by George Raab. Endsheets.
Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro. Edition of 125 numbered copies.

ISBN 978-1-926948-13-3 2013

Due to the demand for copies of "The Critique of Pure Reason" which has outstripped our supply, we have agreed to print a second edition of 200 unnumbered copies which will be distributed by the Author.
ISBN for the second edition is 978-1-926948-19-5
To order copies, please email Ross Leckie at Leckie@unb.ca with "Critique" in the subject line.

Poetry chapbook by Madeline Bassnett

Epoch

Poetry by Jim Johnstone
Artwork by Michael Pittman

Printed on Mohawk Via 'vellum', this book has been released as a numbered limited edition, Smyth-sewn chapbook with covers printed on archival and acid-free St-Armand's 'white cotton' and flyleafs of Japanese Yamato Chiri. 44 pp. Edition of 100 numbered copies.

Fatherhood: The Poetry of Wayne Clifford

Literary Criticism Monograph: number one
by Shane Neilson

This 36-page chapbook has been printed in an edition of 100 numbered copies on Mohawk Superfine Text and hand-sewn into a cover of Canson Mi-Teintes; flyleafs are Nepalese Lokta. Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro.

Poetry chapbook by Daniel Kincade Renton
Artwork by Eva Brannen

Miracle Mile

Short story by Alexander MacLeod.
Title page wood engraving by George A.Walker.

Originally offered in two bindings, this book was printed on acid-free, archival 80 lb. Mohawk Eggshell paper. Covers were printed on bookcloth and mould-made papers
using an Epson printer with K3 pigment inks. Typeset in Sabon. 48 pp.

Editing Moritz

Correspondence Between Shane Neilson and A.F. Moritz during the editing of Now That You Revive.
Wood engravings by Wesley Bates.

Companion to Volume Two of the Contemporary Canadian Poets series, Now That You Revive.

Originally printed on Magnani Biblos and Smyth-sewn into an inner cover of St-Armand
Sisal with a letterpressed wrap of handmade St-Armand Old Masters paper. Typeset in
Garamond Premier Pro with ITC Garamond Handtooled for display. 144 pp.

Sea Legend

Poems by Mark Callanan

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2010 BP NICHOL CHAPBOOK AWARD
WINNER OF AN ALCUIN BOOK DESIGN AWARD, 2010

Originally offered as a hand-sewn chapbook (ISBN 978-0-9810354-6-8), this title has now sold out. However, Mark Callanan has posted an electronic version which can be viewed at:http://issuu.com/markcallanan/docs/sealegend